(Photo: Flickr: nateone)

The Hub Magazine’s “Alive and Clicking: Retailer websites are surprisingly strong as a shopper marketing tool” caught my eye in my RSS Reader the other day.

They do still very much matter, as my clients can explain. As the data in the article shows, for many audiences, a retailer’s core website and its promotional space are ripe opportunities for the retailer and for their consumer packaged goods partner vendors.

The retailer website still rocks as a channel: “28 percent of shoppers use retailer websites, compared to just 12 percent who visit a retailer’s social-media page, 10 percent who use coupons loaded onto a loyalty card, five percent who subscribe to text messages from retailers and three percent who use mobile apps while shopping in a store.”

For moms, the main value is introducing new stores, brands and products. For young men, it’s promoting electronics: “…when targeting Moms on retail websites, manufacturers will achieve a higher response by introducing them to a new store or a new brand. However, while Moms and Boomers are more likely to be influenced by discounts, they are not as likely to be motivated to stray from their pre-planned purchases. While Men, 18-24, are very responsive to marketing on retailer websites, marketing electronics products will have the highest impact.”

About that mom opportunity alone? “Almost 40 percent of Moms said they buy brands they never purchased before based on their visit to retailer websites.”

Out of about 300 headlines in my RSS Reader yesterday, a few really caught my eye and got me thinking – one in particular: Business Insider’s article The Brick-And-Mortar Retail Store Is Headed For Extinction (The Evolution of the Retail Store).

Stories like that one really catch my attention, since most of my time in my day-to-day consulting gig is spent with retail & travel companies – typically the big, legacy, brick & mortar establishments.

This morning, another, similar story passed through my reader: Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books.

It was really interesting to catch those two articles on each others’ heels. Sure, there are dozens more stories every day just like them, but out of the whole stream, I thought that those two, together, summed up the current state of affairs in the Physical to Digital Transition quite nicely.

I don’t agree fully with Business Insider in the somewhat sensational headline that the “retail store is headed for extinction.” I do agree that it’s changing, and will continue to change. Data shows that at every turn. I agree with some of their ideas for how it changes (that it becomes smaller, becomes a marketing footprint, etc.) That begs further questions, though – if “marketing” owns the store footprint, what’s the trade off? What other legacy marketing channels lose funding as a result?

[Full disclosure: I don't work with Amazon as a client, but I work with other retailers, and Amazon is a client of ours... I have peers who work with them.]